High Peaks and Splendid Walks

“That’s all?” the woman said. She meant the number of bears, not the size of the territory.

“Yes,” the ranger said.

The woman found that reassuring. The odds of her coming around a bend in the trail, face to face with a bear, suddenly seemed pretty small.

The ranger went on with his briefing, which was thorough and informative. But my mind was stuck on that figure: 400 square miles. Hard to believe that such a small package could contain so much country. And such singularly magnificent country at that. Seemed like it should have been 4,000, at least.

But, then, a lot of that country runs up and down. This is a mountain park. There are 78 of them that exceed 12,000 feet. Longs Peak, the tallest, reaches 14,259 feet, and that is a big mountain anywhere in the world outside of the Himalayas. The tallest mountain in Europe, Russia’s Mount Elbrus, is 18,510 feet. The Matterhorn is 14,692 feet.

Any reasonably fit and energetic visitor to Rocky Mountain National Park can take a day during the short climbing season and reach the summit of Longs Peak. He will, thus, have climbed a mountain that is almost as tall as the Matterhorn. It isn’t what is called a “technical” climb, but it is a strenuous and demanding walk-up, a challenge and an accomplishment. In the summer, the parking lot at the trailhead where the climb begins will start filling up at one or two in the morning. It is a long climb and you want to have made the summit, turned around, and gotten yourself back down below the treeline before the afternoon thunderstorms begin ominously accumulating and discharging electricity all over the high country.

That climb wasn’t possible in early May when I visited the park. There was still snow, and lots of it, in the high country. But the hard, angular shape of the mountain drew my eyes and made me want to return in the height of summer and give it a shot.

You don’t have to climb, technically or otherwise, to get up into the alpine zone. As formidable as this park is, its wonders can be experienced by car on the Trail Ridge Road, which connects the eastern and western sides of the park and traverses the Continental Divide at a place called Milner Pass. The road works its sinuous way, higher and higher, and eventually reaches an altitude of 12,183 feet. You can—and should—stop at the Alpine Visitors’ Center near the top and take in the views, which are .  .  . well, they are stunning. No other word for it. When I was there, almost a month into spring, the ground below for the first thousand feet or so was still covered with snow. A band of scraggly conifers—Engelmann spruce, I believe—began after that. Down lower came lodgepole and then ponderosa pine. In a few weeks, the snow would be gone and wildflowers—fireweed, lupine, alpine sunflowers, and more than 1,000 other species—would begin blooming and turn the meadows gaudy with color.

Spectacular and unique country tends to stimulate a kind of brooding awe. On the eastern side of the Continental Divide where I stood, the water from the snow melt would soon run off to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. On the western side, the snow melt would find its way to the beginnings of the Colorado River and, ultimately, the Gulf of California. There is something fascinating, in an imponderable way, about this.

Back down at more familiar altitudes, you will find your eyes drawn away from the road ahead. Not, perhaps, dangerously so. Not as if you were texting. But the vistas are irresistible and, then, there are the animals.

There is no hunting in the park; there are signs and notices that make the point emphatically. Elk are so abundant in the park that you wonder whether they might have learned how to read. You see them out in the meadows, looking very scruffy at this time of year. They forage so ravenously that in some areas of the park, aspen stands have been fenced off to keep the elk from destroying them.

The preservation of wildlife was one of the motivations behind the establishment of the park. Most of the iconic species—elk, bear, wolves, moose, etc.—were gone, or reduced to very small numbers, by the time Woodrow Wilson officially established the park in 1915. Now, the elk are everywhere. At one point in my visit, I stopped to take some pictures and wandered down off the road, looking for the best angle. On the way back to my vehicle, I found myself face-to-face with a bull elk, his antlers draped with velvet, and his hide looking like an unmade bed. He looked at me complacently for a few seconds and then wandered off.

In the fall, his antlers would be clean and polished and gleaming like the barrel of a rifle, his hide would be smooth and oily, and he would be on the move through country of flaming aspen, bugling to let the world know he was there.

You can also expect to see bighorn sheep in the park. I didn’t and that was a disappointment and another reason to return. That, and climbing Longs Peak.

There were, however, other opportunities. I took the most popular of them, which was to drive to the Bear Lake trailhead and hike a little ways up into the back country. The parking lot was nearly full, and there were all manner of people coming in or going out. Some with infants that they carried on their backs. Many who looked to have gotten a head start of at least seven decades on those babies.

It was midweek in May. I don’t suppose there could be a more graphic testament to the value and success of the park system than this scene. The parks are meant to protect the grandest of the country’s landscapes. But also to make them accessible to the citizenry. They speak to the wonders of the American land and also the democratic conviction that it is “our land.”

With that little civics lesson out of the way, I slipped some steel cleats over my boots and started down the trail. The lake was still frozen except for one small segment near the trailhead. There was snow on the ground around the lake and a lot of it on the slopes above that, all the way to the pinnacle of Longs Peak, which towered over things in a brooding sort of way.

The trail was not crowded. But I didn’t have it to myself, either. I would stop, occasionally, to let hikers coming out go by.

Traffic thinned out after a while, and that is another quality of this park. It is small in that previously mentioned sense of encompassing “only” 400 square miles. And, with its eastern perimeter only a couple of miles outside of Denver, it is heavily visited. You could build in an extra day at the end of your business conference in Denver or Boulder and spend it here. And, probably, many do.

But crowds tend to be in the crowded places, and if you hit the trail you can find all the solitude you need or crave. The back country is wild and splendid, and with a park permit you can push back in deep and camp. If you want to build a fire, you’ll need to use a designated site but otherwise, you are on your own.

I had flashes of that kind of solitude on my two-mile walk to Bierstadt Lake, named for the great landscape painter of the American West. Albert Bierstadt visited the area in 1876, painting large prospects of Estes Park and Longs Peak. Like his contemporaries in the romantic Hudson River School, Bierstadt conveyed the sublime in nature—powerful, brooding explorations of the vastness and awe-inspiring qualities of wilderness. If Bierstadt had been a poet, he would have been Byron, probably.

I like his paintings—I have a couple of prints on my office walls—and he could have painted the view of Longs Peak, towering and austere and epic, that I saw on my way back out of the park.

I exchanged cheerful greetings with people in the parking lot and headed out. Two hours to Denver? It seemed infinitely farther than that. Just as the park seems infinitely larger than 400 square miles.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.